Perspectives on the beautiful game of soccer; fueled by enormous amounts of coffee

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Lalas on San Jose

I asked Alexi Lalas if he thought the expansion of SJ would have a big affect on the current rosters of MLS teams, in terms of diluting the talent pool.

"It remains to be seen what the rules are going to be for this expansion and how they’re going to go about stocking their team. In the past they’ve been a very organic type of team in terms of the players that they’ve gotten. I don’t know if they’re going to continue to do that or if they’re going to look outside of the league. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But they’re going to want to get back to the level that San Jose was very quickly. It’s certainly not going to be easy, because most of those guys are in Houston."

9 comments:

Lalas on Fox Football Fone-In was quality theater the other day. Lalas did say something interesting (paraphrasing) "We want players who are going to relish the experience of playing in this situation, rise to the occassion...at the end of this year we will look at who was successful this year." I wonder if he can pleased with himself though? The schedule, playing time, team constructed, coach hired, moves to adjust the team mid-season...all things he had a hand in. He must give himself negative marks.

Questions the fans can't? You could email Lalas. Or you could do what the fans that called into Fox Football Phone-in this past Tuesday did - ask themselves. He answered their questions there. They were pretty upset and they let him know about it.

Insinuating stuff about me isn't going to incline me to be your mouthpiece. That's not what I consider my job to be, by the way.

What is AEG - Tim Leiweke esp. - thinking with regards to Lalas? Somebody will be paying for this year - somebody will be fired, either Yallop or Lalas or both. AEG will not fire anyone without a replacement(s) ready, so it would be interesting to know what replacements AEG is considering. Who are they talking to? Klinsi is one, but there must be others...

Lalas doesn't respond to e-mails that he doesn't want to. The Fox show was heavily screened. Anyone who had a critical call to Lalas was screened. The ones that got through lied about what they were going to ask.

So you've tried to email him? I don't know about Fox's screening policies, but I have a hard time believing Cohen or Webster, if they're anything like they are when I meet them in the pressbox, would go out of their way to go easy on Lalas.